The American Moberg: Lillian Budd's Swedish American Trilogy

The American Moberg:
Lillian Budd's Swedish American Trilogy
Ithough she is nearly forgotten in the Swedish-American com­munity
today, Lillian Budd was once one of the most popular
authors Swedish America ever produced. Beginning with A p r i l
Snow (1951) and continuing through two additional novels, L a n d of
S t r a n g e r s (1953) and A p r i l H a r v e s t (1959), Budd presented the story
of a single Swedish-American family emigrating to the Chicago area
at the turn of the twentieth century. Much as Vilhelm Moberg did in
The E m i g r a n t s , Budd attempted to give a sense of the broad sweep of
the emigrant experience, following the family of Karl Mattias Petersson
from Sweden to the New World and into an American-born genera­tion.
Indeed, one of Budd's press releases called her "USA's Vilhelm
Moberg." She and Moberg do share a number of qualities. They both
wrote multi-volume works about the great migration from Sweden to
America. They both conducted tireless research. They both focused
on the fate of a single family on the American soil. Both series began
to appear at mid-century. But Moberg's work remains vital literature,
ranked as Sweden's own choice for the most important fictional work
of the twentieth century, while Budd's work feels far more dated, and
her prose lacks the vital quality that characterizes The E m i g r a n t s .
Nevertheless, Budd's three volumes preserve a valuable piece of the
CARL ISAACSON currently teaches communications arts at Sterling College in K a n ­sas,
about fifty miles from Lindsborg. He was educator/curator at the Swedish A m e r i ­can
M u s e u m in C h i c a g o . His research focuses mainly on the theatrical and material
aspects of Swedish-American culture in Chicago, and his essay "They Didn't Forget
Their Swedish: Class Markers in the Swedish-American Community" will appear in
Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City's Neighborhoods,
Maria F a n , ed. (Mahwah, N J . : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, lnc., forthcoming 2003).
C A R L I S A A C S ON
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history of Swedish America. Written in the post-World War II, post-
Tercentenary, and post-Centennial era, they show us the face of
Swedish America, not as it was in 1891-1925 (the era in which
volumes 2 and 3 are set), but as it was becoming at mid-century.
In this article I will examine how Budd's work fits into and marks
changes in Swedish-American identity at mid-century. Because of
her obscurity in Swedish-American historical writing, I need to begin
by giving a brief biographical sketch and summarizing the three nov­els,
before turning to the question of what these books tell us about
Swedish-American ethnic identity in the post-World War II era and
beyond.
Lillian Budd was born in Chicago on 21 July 1897, and was a
child of Swedish immigrant parents Charles A . and Selma Nelson
Peterson. According to the book jacket of L a n d of S t r a n g e r s , she grew
up in Chicago and Oak Park, both of which figure in L a n d of Strang¬
ers and A p r i l H a r v e s t . She had one sister, Sigrid, a resident of Lombard,
Illinois, for most of her adult life. In 1918 Lillian married Fred Budd
of Budd Lake, New Jersey, and they had one son, Richard Nelson
Budd.
Lillian Budd began working for Western Electric in 1915. Whether
she joined the company before or after the 24 July Eastland disaster is
not clear, but that event clearly stuck in her mind and formed the
basis for one of the most memorable episodes in A p r i l H a r v e s t . 1
She ended her career with Western Electric in 1917, volunteer­ing
for military service at the beginning of the American entry into
the war. She served as a Naval Yeoman in the Office of Naval
Operations, Washington, D.C. This service put her in regular contact
with the President, Woodrow Wilson, and his young Under-Secretary
of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Following the war she re­turned
to the western suburbs of Chicago and became involved in
American Legion Post 52, where she was the only female member
and membership chair.
In 1940 she moved to Geneva, Illinois, where she was active in
civic affairs and began to compile the historical information she used
as background to L a n d of S t r a n g e r s . During the Second World War
she served as chief clerk for the Kane County Selective Service
Board in Geneva, remaining in that post until 1947—when she be-
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gan yet another career, as promotions manager and assistant to the
vice president of the Campana Sales Company of Batavia, Illinois.
She remained with them until 1951. It was while employed by
Campana that she wrote her first novel, A p r i l S n o w . She moved to
Lombard in 1947, residing there until 1970. In that year Lillian and
her sister, Sigrid, broke up the home they shared and moved to the
West and East Coasts, respectively. Sigrid settled in Princeton, New
Jersey, to be with her son, Marshall Sittig; Lillian moved back to
California, where she remained until passing away in April 1989.
During her lifetime Lillian Budd
received the kinds of honors she
wished for Karl Petersson (called Carl
Christianson after his immigration),
the central character of L a n d o f
S t r a n g e r s . In 1954 her sorority,
Sigma Kappa, began awarding the
Lillian P. Budd "trophy" to the chap­ter
that did the most significant work
in aging and gerontology. In 1964
she was elected the first national
honorary member of Phi Gamma Nu
national business fraternity. The
Briggs Floral Company of Califor­nia
named a large white gladiolus
April Snow in her honor. Her work
as a pioneer woman in the military
continues to be remembered by
military historians, and the Lombard,
Illinois, pubic library has a signifi­cant
memorial to her, adding to its
collection each year in her name.
Budd began writing professionally rather late in life. She was fifty-two
when she finished A p r i l S n o w , her first book. That work proved
to be both a commercial and a critical success, selling over 250,000
copies by 1955, bringing her instant recognition in the Chicago
literary community, and prompting her work on the second volume
of the trilogy, L a n d of S t r a n g e r s . After publication of April H a r v e st
Lillian Budd. F r o m Something About
the Author, vol. 7 (Detroit: Gale Re-search
Book Tower, 1 9 7 5 ).
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(1959), she turned from the writing of adult fiction to children's
literature, and produced works on Indian legends, on Swedish holi­day
customs, and an A B C book. The trilogy continued to be popu­lar,
however, and was reissued in paperback in 1979. In total, she
wrote three adult novels, one juvenile and seven children's books,
and one local history. Her last work, Footsteps on t h e T a l l Grass P r a i r i e:
A H i s t o r y of L o m b a r d , 1 L , was completed in 1975, when Budd was a
vigorous seventy-eight.
Her goal as a novelist was modest. Her success as a writer, she
hoped, would encourage other women to write, even while "hold[ing]
down a full time job successfully, com[ing] home and cook[ing] din­ners."
As might be expected of the era, the three novels are marked
by this same domestic concern. A l l the heroines are heroic at home,
managing to keep a "good house" despite overwhelming odds.
The trilogy tells the story of one Swedish emigrant family. Its
central figures are Carl and Ellen Christianson, as they are known in
America—Karl Petersson and Elin Nilsson, as they are known in
Sweden—and their forebears and progeny. The first and most suc­cessful
volume, A p r i l S n o w , is set in Sweden and treats life on the old
family farm. Central to Karl's life and story are his parents. His father,
Peter Christiansson, is a miserly, pietistic Swede who refuses to work
the farm since it is his wife's inheritance. His mother, Sigrid, is the
true heroine of Budd's heart. She is hard working, clever, pious with­out
being pietistic, and a lover of literature. It is she who has inher­ited
the family farm, Norden. Karl is the first male in a family of
many children, and clearly his mother's favorite. Early in this first
volume he is given a horse, Hjärta, on which he sets his future hopes
and through whom Budd motivates much of the action in the first
two volumes of the trilogy. The book is set on one of the islands in
the Göteborg skerries. Though we are given the name of the farm,
the island itself is never named. From clues in L a n d of S t r a n g e r s we
can guess that it is located north of Göteborg.
The second work, L a n d of S t r a n g e r s , follows Karl as he leaves
home, completes his military service, begins work as a farm hand in
Småland, and finally emigrates to America. In the second half of this
volume Karl Mattias Petersson, renamed Carl Matthew Christianson
by immigration officials at Castle Gardens in New York, settles in
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Chicagoland, marries Elin Nilsson, begins to raise a family (a girl,
Sigrid, and a boy, Tony), and finally perishes doing a heroic deed.
The third volume, A p r i l H a r v e s t , tells of orphaned daughter Sigrid
beginning life as a young adult, enduring the trials of the early twen­tieth
century and finally marrying the "boy next door," a young
Dutch-American doctor, Nico van Vlaardingen.
Thematically, the three works celebrate the cultural triumph of
the European American. In Budd's view, America truly is a melting
pot of all European nationals. She begins developing this theme early
in Carl's American experience. In the middle of L a n d of S t r a n g e r s,
Carl, hoping to become enrolled in a stenography course at Wheaton
College, travels from New York to Geneva, Illinois, to seek his for­tune.
There he becomes part of a largely Swedish community, though
he does develop a positive relationship with the American-born Mr.
Bailey, editor of the temperance paper The P a t r o l He also finds and
"adopts" an Italian street urchin, Tony, whose father is an alcoholic.
(Another major theme is the evil of drink.) Budd further develops
the theme of America the melting pot with the birth of Carl and
Ellen's son. Carl insists that the boy be named Tony. She pushes the
theme further when Carl saves the life of a little German-American
boy, Bobby Schmotzer. The theme reaches a peak in A p r i l H a r v e s t,
when Sigrid gathers around her Dutch, Finnish, German, Irish, and
American friends for a Fourth of July celebration. Of course, Sigrid
has all these friends because of her open heartedness, solid work
ethic, and winning personality, which Budd portrays as ideal Swed­ish-
American character traits. Finally, Budd articulates the theme
most fully at the end of A p r i l H a r v e s t . As Sigrid returns home from
her first trip to Sweden, seeing the Statue of Liberty and the ap­proaching
coastline, she thinks:
The very air repeated her father's words: "Every country can
say, 'Next to my own country, in American there are more of
our nationals than anywhere else.'" America—upon whom
the whole world was depending for guidance. America—the
only country related to all countries by blood, thereby neces­sarily
being the one to take the leadership in joining all
countries of the world in friendly bond.
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" A n d America is my home!"2
Budd's fictional characters function in a historically accurate mi­lieu,
particularly when she describes nineteenth-century Geneva, Illi­nois,
but they remain fictional characters so she can develop the
themes that she finds appropriate to this trilogy of Swedish-American
life. The theme of the melting pot raises the question of the meaning
of ethnic identity if this "country [is] related to all countries by
blood" and must therefore take "leadership in joining all countries of
the world in friendly bond." Must each ethnic group give up its
identity, or is it possible to affirm the older versions of ethnic iden­tity?
Or must ethnicity be thought of in some new way? Budd's work
answers that it is possible to maintain aspects of the old ethnicity, but
there are also new aspects of ethnic identity for the Swedish Ameri­can.
These new aspects define a new identity, one fit for the third and
fourth generations of the children of European immigrants. It is to
those affirmations and changes we now turn.
In the three novels, Budd affirms, and even attempts to extend,
the mythos by which the Swedish-American intellectual elite had
shaped ethnic consciousness from the 1880s through the 1930s. With
the end of the great migration, the end of the Depression, and the
coming (and ending) of the Second World War, ethnic consciousness
among the Swedish Americans shifted perceptibly. Several keen ob­servers
saw the change coming even prior to mid-century.
In his 1945 narrative of the hardships faced by some of the
immigrants, Va r t togo de vägen?, John Miller remarked that "the end
of Swedishness in America is going quickly now." He then contin­ued:
A l l Swedish-American organizations are going backwards.
The total number of members is declining, it is only the
elderly people who take part in the work of the associations.
It isn't as lively at the conferences as before, when youth was
on the move. The denominations have long ago abandoned
the Swedish language. For various reasons it has been pre­served
in some of the associations, but even here it will
slowly disappear entirely. That does not mean that Swedish
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America will lose its importance as a bridge between America
and Sweden, quite otherwise, the descendants of the Swedes
who are totally incorporated into the American society have
greater potential to serve here as an intermediary than the
first generation, who were required to work hard just to put
food on the table in this foreign land.3
Alex Carlson, in the essay "It Was a June Day in Lincoln Park,"
shares a similar evaluation of the future of Swedish America. A t a
Linné Day celebration the narrator meets one of the Swedish-Ameri­can
urban pioneers, who remarks that "the old folks die out, bit by
bit, and the young choose new paths. For those of us who came over
the sea, Carl von Linné on Linné Day represents the whole of Swe­den
and the memories all of us carry of it, wherever our crib stood in
Sweden's Kingdom." After the old man leaves, the narrator continues
to ponder the future of Swedish America, fearing that it will not
outlive this generation. Then he hears a Vasa children's choir, singing
in "ringing clear Swedish" learned from parents and the group leader,
and understands that the culture will continue, though the language
in which it is related may shift.
Yes, the young are those who will continue the tradition here
in Lincoln Park once a year, and if they can't sing in Swedish,
the same songs can be sung in English, which is of course the
country's language and works just as well, for the words could
be translated and the music is always the same. Yes, the
young are those, regardless of which organization they belong
to, who will uphold the tradition as long as they are not
ashamed of their Swedish roots, and therefore there is no
reason not to hope for the present or the future and the
language forms the same thoughts, even if the expressions
are different.4
With both Miller and Carlson one finds an acknowledgment of
the gradual change in Swedish America now reaching a definite
turning point, and also a sense of nostalgia for the history of the
community in Chicago. Writing in approximately the same historical
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period, Budd describes the content of Swedish-American ethnic con­sciousness
after the changes have occurred. In this Budd is the more
perceptive observer. Her distance and isolation from the main cur­rents
of Chicago's Swedish-America society should be seen as factors
enabling her to note, describe, and chronicle what is "new" in Swed­ish
America at mid-twentieth century. In her historical novels Budd
describes Swedish-Americanism not so much as it was in 1890 as in
1950. The identity formed for these characters contains both "essen­tial"
characteristics, held in common and throughout the existence
of the Swedish-American community, and "accidental" characteris­tics
that have radically changed by mid-century.
Budd believed that three qualities were essential to define Swed­ish-
Americanism: a filiopietistic love of one's ancestor race; the clus­ter
"cleanliness, order, beauty, and justice"; and the Viking heritage.
These will be given closer attention below, and I then will examine
three qualities earlier Swedish Americans took to be essential but
which became, by mid-century, accidental: living as a Swedish com­munity,
speaking the Swedish language, and developing a public and
political expression of Swedishness.
ESSENTIALS: FILIOPIETY, CLEANLINESS, AND VIKING HERITAGE
Swedish-American history writing, like much of American his­tory
writing throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth
century, displayed a strong tendency toward filiopietism. Whether
the subject was Sweden, America (Parson Weems' stories of George
Washington are repeated in the 1890 reader published by Augustana
Synod for use in Swedish schools), or Swedish America, historical
and biographical writing concentrated on telling a positive story.
The negative details were usually omitted. The forebears were all
presented as heroic and without serious flaw.
Consider, for example, the biography of Othelia Myhrman in
H i s t o r y of the Swedes of I l l i n o i s . 5 While these biographies often owe a
great deal to the subject, rather than being objective biography,
nevertheless they do illuminate a basic self-understanding of Swedish
Americans in the early twentieth century. In Myhrman's case, the
biography omits a number of interesting and relevant facts. Her
119
husband's drinking problems and her subsequent divorce are not
mentioned, even though they are pertinent to her involvement in
relief work and make her a more compelling figure.
Likewise, the biography of Anders (Andrew) Löfström, a promi­nent
publisher of the D a l k u l l a n A l m a n a k s , lists only his convention­ally
acceptable roles and omits his involvement with the Bohemian
element of Chicago's Swedish-American society. During the early
years of the century, Löfström's joke books, in addition to pirating
humorous material from Sweden, also published original humor from
the likes of Ninian Waerner and Gus Higgins. These two, along with
actor/director Ernest Lindblom, were the center of a lively, hard-drinking
Bohemian subculture in Chicago. Higgin's drawings of Chi­cago
Avenue Swedish life give us a sense that the filiopietistic reports
are not telling the whole story, and that in fact the missing pieces are
at least as interesting as what is reported in the standard histories of
the period.
Budd's work does not break from the filiopietistic tradition of
Swedish-American history writing. Although she gives her central
character a major flaw—Carl develops a serious drinking problem,
which remains unsolved throughout his life in the New World—she
never allows this to become the kind of problem we see portrayed
among the Irish and Italian drinkers. Instead, reports of Carl's drink­ing
problems are always undercut by events in which heroism over­comes
the deficit created by his drinking. Typical of the episodes is
one in chapter 20. Ellen has just announced that she is expecting.
Carl, not sure what to do, spends a restless night and leaves for work
the next morning having argued with his wife. He does not return
the whole night. Ellen suspects the worst. When Carl is brought back
to the house, wet and bedraggled, Ellen thinks
So this was what manner of man she had for a husband. A n d
she in the family way. While she sat home and waited and
worried, while she bad good-morning to the sun by retching,
he had sat in some saloon!6
Budd then immediately undercuts Ellen's anger with Carl's boss's
report of Carl's heroism. Carl was not in a saloon, but spent the night
120
fighting a fire at the milk-bottling plant. A t the climax of the fire,
just as the beams holding up the roof fell, Carl rushed back into the
burning building to save a child, and then one last time to save a
"tiny kitten, a calico kitten colored orange, white and black."7 She
does likewise in A p r i l H a r v e s t , where another Swede is given a charac­ter
flaw and a drinking problem. In that episode Sigrid saves young
Jack Yngling from alcohol and criminality, and convinces her em­ployer
to take Jack on as his mechanic.
Budd reaffirms the historical view of an earlier generation. Part of
that piety ascribed certain characteristics to the forebears. One of the
clearest, briefest statements of these characteristics—contemporane­ous
with Budd's writing—is found in Benson and Hedin's A m e r i c a ns
f r o m Sweden. Discussing the Swedish Americans who practiced law
and served in government, Benson and Hedin note: "Instinctively
they love order and justice just as they do cleanliness and beauty."8
These characteristics are central in the mythos of Swedish America.
Being hard-working, clean, and honest distinguishes the Swede from
other nationalities. Budd follows the model, making all of the dishon­est
characters in L a n d of S t r a n g e r s American-born. Whatever Carl's
flaws, he is never less than honest. Likewise Ellen and Sigrid. Honesty
and the nobility that accompanies truthfulness are inherent in their
characters.
So too are cleanliness and hard work. With a baby on the way,
Carl and Ellen rent an apartment, which badly needs cleaning. Ellen
turns a basement hovel into a proper Swedish home. Later, despite
coming from an upper-class family, Ellen takes the occupation of a
laundress, one that requires both cleanliness and hard work. A t the
beginning of A p r i l H a r v e s t , Sigrid demonstrates that she too is indus­trious
and clean. Immediately following her father's funeral, Sigrid
expects mourners to come by the Calico Row house and feels that
she must be a proper hostess.
With the coming of the light she went to the kitchen and put
on a gingham apron. The neighbors would be dropping in;
she must have lots of coffee ready, egg coffee, and the mak­ings
of tea for the few who preferred it, and milk for the
children. How many apple cakes would she need? Better
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make plenty.9
The sense of justice and order is apparent in the evening Carl
spends listening to Martina Arneson practice her speech on women's
suffrage and prohibition, during his Geneva sojourn. Later, when
Hattie Allspaugh espouses the same views, Carl wonders, "What was
it about this woman that urged him to reject his life-long champion­ship
of woman's cause?"10
That championship was learned from his Morfar in Sweden, and
Carl carries it, at least in principle, throughout the first two novels.
This same theme of the love of justice lies behind the inclusion of
excluded individuals, such as the shunned children Sigrid is called
upon to take into her circle of friends.
As important as it is for Budd to show us that there is a sense of
justice among these Swedes, it is just as important to show that their
sense of justice has been passed down from one generation to an­other.
The ultimate source of all that Carl and Ellen are is their
Viking heritage. By making the Viking stock so central to her main
characters (she claims that the island on which Norden is situated
was Grendel's lair and connects Göteborg with the Geats), Budd
reaffirms another essential feature of the Swedish-American identity:
that Swedes learned their justice from their Viking ancestors. The
Viking spirit gives Swedes a passion for democracy as well as a sense
of adventure, hardiness as workers, strength, and endurance of char­acter—
as well as their capacity for alcohol consumption.
That the Viking spirit was celebrated among Swedish Americans
is easy to see. Countless Swedish clubs took names of the Viking
gods: Freya, Thor, Odin, Balder, Brage. One of the most successful of
Chicago's singing clubs, the Svithiod, was "Viking themed." The art
of the period is likewise filled with stereotypical images of Vikings,
such as Axel Linus's 1930s painting The M e a d F l o w s , executed for the
Svithiod club; or his painting of the conference of Erik the Red, and
others. That all this adds up to a claim for democracy originating in
Viking times is a bit more difficult to establish. It was, however, a
common argument that the Viking council, the Thing, was and re­mains
the basis for Western democracy.11
While Budd affirms many more of the earlier aspects of Swedish-
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American identity, thus agreeing that they are essential to Swedishness
even in America, what is of greater interest are the three characteris­tics
that she makes "accidental," that is, caused by circumstances and
therefore open to change. These are enclave living, the use of Swed­ish,
and a public and in some sense political—and therefore manly
(in the nineteenth-century sense of that term)—culture. Each of
these facets of Swedish Americanism had radically changed by the
post-World War II era. Each is also an aspect of Swedish-American­ism
today that is seen as permanent but is, in fact, a relatively recent
historic development.
ACCIDENTALS: RESIDENTIAL PATTERNS, SWEDISH LANGUAGE,
PUBLIC CULTURE
From 1850 until 1900, Swedish settlement in Chicago was largely
confined to the area known as Swede Town, bounded by the Chi­cago
River on the south and west, Division Street on the north, and
Clark Street on the east. After the great Chicago fire of 1871, some
of the Swedes used the loss as an occasion to move to the new
suburban communities of Lake View (Belmont and Clark), Edgewater
(Clark and Foster), and Englewood (63rd and Halsted). Part of the
reason for the move was upward mobility. Another part of the story
was the development of a new, convenient public transportation
system that linked the city center with its outlying suburbs. The
pattern of dispersal was repeated for other ethnic groups as well. The
Bohemians moved southwest from the center of the city to Pilsen
and Little Village, the Norwegians northwest to Logan Square.
Between 1880 and 1905, the basic outlines of what we know
today as the CTA, with its elevated and surface lines (in 1905 the
street railway), had been established, connecting all points of the
rapidly expanding city. It was no longer necessary for workers, or
their bosses, to live within walking distance of their place of employ­ment.
For five cents, the fare set by law, every worker could now live
where he and his family chose. The upwardly mobile Swedes of
Swede Town chose to move out of the old and deteriorating neigh­borhood.
1 2
The second settlements of Swedes in the Chicago area were, not
123
surprisingly, at the ends of rapid transit lines. The dispersal was away
from the original settlement, but was not a general dispersal of the
Swedes into the larger American community. In the closing decades
of the great migration (1900 to 1930), Swedish immigrants contin­ued
to arrive needing the support offered by a solid ethnic commu­nity
of their countrymen. The new century's Swedes were still bat­tling
the English language and still, according to Methodist pastor
and social worker John P. Miller, apt to fall into the hands of the
unscrupulous, the "runners," who were bent on separating the "green­horn"
from his cash and might lead him into drink or worse. The
social organizations that supported the newcomers-—the church, the
fraternal and the social service organizations, as well as the stores and
amusements designed to remind the Swedish newcomer of the home­land—
were clustered in the ethnic enclave.
Budd's Swedish Americans do not need the support of a Swedish
network. When Carl arrives in Chicago following his time in Geneva
and his involvement in a disastrous get-rich-quick scheme, he settles
into work and lives in a boarding house on Clark Street. The land­lady
gets high praise from Carl, but we fail to learn her name. That
Budd intended the reader to assume Carl lived in the Swedish dis­trict
seems likely, since he "doubles up" during hard times with the
alcoholic but good-hearted Swede Andy Nelson. Nelson, brother of
Carl's Swedish love, Elin Nilsson, dies. Elin (at this point in the
narrative known as Ellen Anderson) comes from New York for the
funeral, and Carl rents a room nearby "at Mrs. Binney's boarding-house
on Clark Street . . . not a fine room, but passable and as clean
as any Irishwoman kept a room."13
After Carl and Ellen marry, they room with Mrs. Lonergin until
Ellen's first pregnancy. Ellen then finds a cheap flat ("not far from
Rose H i l l Cemetery"), let to them by a Mr. Ferguson. When Ellen's
tuberculosis threatens and the doctor advises a move away from the
lake, she and Carl rent a flat "near the city limits" from Hattie
Allspaugh. Their downstairs neighbor is a Mrs. Kant. Finally, the
family moves into the fictional suburb of Oakhurst, into "Calico
Row," where they are surrounded by all nationalities. The only Swede
in the picture is Pastor Bedell, and the only hint in the second
volume that he is a Swede is his wife's name, Kristen.
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While in Chicago, Carl and Ellen participate in both American
activities (going to an American theater and the White Sox game)
and Swedish activities (a dance at the North Side Turner Hall). Carl
gets himself arrested at a socialist rally where Swede Axel Lindquist is
the featured speaker. He works for contractor Einar Swanson, an­other
Swede. But all the connections to a Swedish community occur
prior to the move to Oakhurst. After that, and through the third
volume of the novel, there is no Swedish community to which to
turn for support. There are only individual Swedes and Swedish
families.1 4 Yet the trilogy ends with Sigrid more "Swedish" than either
of her parents. After marriage, she and her new husband set about
building "Norden, Illinois, America"—"a replica of her father's home"
that would make it "possible for her native-born American friends to
know how her forefathers had lived in another land."1 5 Clearly, Budd
is telling us is that it is not necessary to live among Swedes, either
exclusively or even primarily, in order to feel the sense of being a
Swede. It is the heart which determines one's Swedishness, not the
neighborhood. The accidental characteristic of enclave living has no
effect on the quality of one's soul.
This shift from living in enclaves to living dispersed among the
general population correlates with three events: the cessation of the
immigrant stream around 1930, the policy of the GI Bill regarding
loans for housing construction, and the opening of the interstate
highway system. The first meant that there was no further need for an
ethnically homogeneous neighborhood to support and Americanize
newly arrived, non-English speaking immigrants. The effect of the
cessation was not, however, immediately felt in residential patterns.
The effect of the GI Bill was immediate. Returning veterans
could not use GI Bill funds to buy existing homes in the old neigh­borhoods,
nor was there land to develop in the old neighborhoods.
The suburb as we know it today was given birth after 1945. Like so
many others, Swedish Americans became suburbanites.
The effects of the cessation of the immigrant stream and the
building of suburban housing were well underway when Budd wrote
A p r i l S n o w . The event that spelled the end of the ethnic enclave, she
did not experience but did anticipate. The Edens Expressway, the
first in Chicago, opened the northern suburbs for settlement in 1959.
125
The Kennedy opened in 1964, and the northwest corridor was ready
to be settled. Like the extension of the transit system, the opening of
the new expressways encouraged resettlement from the old neighbor­hoods.
But without the need to keep to an ethnic enclave, and with
the increasing ease with which Swedes found themselves accepted in
the general population, the settlers no longer needed to settle to­gether.
Enclave living truly was a chapter in the history of mass
migration and not an essential of Swedishness in post-1945 America.
The second accidental quality of Swedishness in Swedish America
was the use of the Swedish language. The language question was a
long and hotly debated one, with most of the elite of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries coming to the conclusion that loss of the
Swedish language meant loss of the ancient and noble culture of
Geijer, Tegnér, Afzelius, Strindberg, Heidenstam, Bellman, Lagerlöf,
and Fröding. This was culture to the literary elite, that is, the journal­ists
and the clergy.
Culture, argued the elite, was preserved by the language. Swed­ish
was not, or at least not seriously, taken to be God's purest tongue,
as was English by some anglophiles and German by the Lutheran
Church Missouri Synod. But it was held up for the immigrants as a
pure and holy tongue which deserved respect and proper usage.
Proper usage is what Budd fails to give Swedish, particularly in
L a n d of S t r a n g e r s . Her errors in Swedish are frequent and egregious.
Her use of the language in this volume marks her as one who is
learning Swedish while she is writing about Swedish Americans. She
writes, for example, that Ellen would tell Carl that she has "arbeta
i d a g " an imperative rather than a simple past. While still in Sweden,
Karl ponders those who wait for their inheritance before taking an
entrepreneurial risk. They are sure that someday soon a " s t u r e arv
comer i n " using a very old-fashioned form of stör, the English come
instead of the Swedish a t t k o m m a , and the English in instead of the
Swedish i , and putting it all in a direct translation of an American
phrase that would never be used in Swedish.1 6 The examples could
easily be multiplied.
Budd was not alone in having a less than perfect command of the
language of her forebears. For example, the chapter in Geneva's
centennial history covering the Swedes there quotes the song "Skada
126
a t t A m e r i k a " a popular immigrant ballad. It misspells two words. Or
again, the Swedish American Museum, Chicago, has a poster on
display announcing the great national day to honor Gustavus
Adolphus. It misspells the great king's name.
Facility in Swedish slipped in America via two routes. It declined
as fewer Swedes arrived, lessening the number of Swedish speakers
who could renew the language in America. As the first generation's
children matured, they were less able and had fewer occasions to use
the language. English was their mother tongue and Swedish their
second language. Swedish facility also declined through the use of
American Swedish, a peculiar blend of Swedish and English that was
used both as an everyday language among Swedish Americans and,
in literature, as a comic dialect akin to the use of the dialects of
Småland, Värmland, and Skåne in Sweden.
In Budd's fictional world, all that is needed to express Swedishness
are a few phrases. In A p r i l H a r v e s t , for example, Sigrid teaches an
Irish orphan boy not to leave the dinner table before saying the
obligatory "tack för m a t e n . " Carl plays the Swedish version of "Intsie
Weentsie Spider" with his son Tony. A l l the children learn "Rida, Rida
Ranka." These few phrases are all that is needed, because the center
of Swedish culture in the new Swedish America is not the high
culture, either literary or visual. It is folk culture.
Visit a Swedish-American home today and one is likely to find
one or all of the following items: a white coffee pot decorated with
kurbits flowers and the phrase "Kaffetåren den bästa är af a l l a jordiska
d r i c k e r " ; a Carl Larsson print; and one or more Dala horses. In the
post-World War II period, culture shifted its meaning in Swedish
America, and that shift cut it loose from the use of Swedish, though
the continuing popularity of adult education courses attests to a
desire to communicate "a lite g r a n n , " at least, in the ancestral lan­guage.
Like the ancestral language, Budd observes a fading of the ances­tral
politics, or at least a less public face to the political expressions.
From the C i v i l War to the Great Depression, Swedish Americans
(with the exception of the Texas Swedes, cf. Larry Scott's S w e d i sh
T e x a n s ) were dependably Republican in their politics. The characters
in the America volumes are all, with the exception of the American
127
Hattie Allspaugh, reliably Republican. But their Republicanism is
expressed in voting and in opinions spoken in the security of the
household.
The first political philosophy we meet on the American soil
comes in Budd's Geneva chapters. The philosopher is the expressman's
wife, Martina. Prevented by a heavy rain storm from attending a
temperance talk, Martina practices a speech she is scheduled to give
in the presence of Jane Addams, a speech on women's suffrage. Carl
listens approvingly, for he has learned to value women's suffrage at
home at Norden.1 7 This is the closest that Budd gets to allowing her
Swedish characters a public display of their political principles.
More frequently, Carl's, and later Sigrid's, Republicanism is a
private matter. Attending the opening of the World Columbian Ex­position,
Carl hears the lament, "The Democrats are in; now we will
have hard times," and he smiles to hear the word go round, for he
knows no hard times himself.1 8 Carl expresses the sentiment that the
country will face dire consequences if it is foolish enough to elect Mr.
Bryan and allow him to institute his silver standard.19 He opposes the
imposition of an income tax.2 0 These are all standard Republican
positions of the era, but they are always expressed as private opin­ions,
never given an organized and public expression.
Similarly, Sigrid's Republicanism is expressed strictly in an indi­vidualistic
and family manner. A p r i l H a r v e s t spans two contested presi­dential
elections, and in each Sigrid exhibits Republican sympathies.
She is not enfranchised for the 1916 Wilson/Hughes contest. She
casts her first vote for the Republican Warren G . Harding and his
running mate, Calvin Coolidge. The whole neighborhood goes for
Harding, except for Hattie Allspaugh. Allspaugh is a native-born
American, and she issues her opinion as an American, not as a
member of an ethnic group. While the Swedes in A p r i l H a r v e s t all
vote for the same ticket, they are not conscious of being a Swedish
voting block.
This is in contrast to the political awareness of the Swedes in
Cook County. In the biographies found in H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , one frequently encounters notice of political affiliation among
the Cook County Swedes. Individuals are described as "a rock ribbed
Republican," "a true and loyal Republican," "a staunch Republican,"
128
and the like. Surveying the biographies, one finds that many of the
Swedes profiled were active in organized politics. Alexander Ander­son,
for example, held "several offices in the Swedish Democratic
National Assembly,"2 1 while Oscar Dell Olsson was the secretary of
the "Swedish-American [sic] Republican League of Illinois for 1902-
03."2 2 Further, Axel Jonas Walter af Jochnick "worked zealously to
form a regiment of Swedish-Americans [sic] in Chicago" at the out­break
of the Spanish-American war.2 3 What should be noted is that
many of these self-designated strong Republicans identified them­selves
as Swedish Republicans (or Democrats, or Socialists, as the
case may be).
In the early years of the twentieth century, ethnicity was a public
matter with political and social consequences. While many Swedes
declared themselves "independent," and more were simply unwilling
to discuss their politics in print, the community leaders in Chicago's
most Swedish wards knew that organization meant political clout,
jobs, and services for their ward and precinct. Likewise, American
political leaders counted on ethnic leaders to deliver the votes in
their respective wards.
Budd's two novels lack the sense of a public ethnicity in their
political expositions. That dissolution of the public face of ethnic
politics accompanies the dissolution of the solid Swedish ward. With
the Swedish populace scattered into the community, there was no
question of delivering blocks of votes, of winning an election ethnic
precinct by ethnic precinct. In post-1945 politics, the vote that
"counts" is the vote of an individual, and not the vote of an ethnic
block.
As the political culture shifted, and Swedish ethnicity took on a
less important political meaning, the question of usefulness and with
it the meaning of ethnicity shifted. I believe this involved a shift from
the older Swedish-American culture defined as a culture of "manly
affairs" to a more domesticated culture that was imitative of the
perceived folk traditional culture of Sweden. Swedish-American cul­ture,
in other words, ceased to be a living, developing culture and
attempted to become a frozen, "authentic" folk culture. In so doing,
many Swedish Americans became "more Swedish than Sweden."
The Swedish-American culture of the nineteenth and early twen-
129
tieth centuries was rich, varied, and developing. It had its own litera­ture,
though much of it was either religious or journalistic. It had its
own oratory, both political and religious. Much of its social life was
centered around associational life, which in itself was richly varied.
Labor saw the rise of groups such as Swedish painters' and carpenters'
unions. The crafts and professions likewise had substantial-sized "guilds,"
such as the Swedish Engineers Society, the Swedish Watchmakers
Society, and the Swedish Artists Association. In addition, there was a
wide variety of fraternal organizations, theatrical associations, and
singing societies. Some existed purely for entertainment, while others
sought to provide the working-class Swede with moral uplift and life
insurance. Still other associations existed primarily for social welfare,
while others had mixed purposes. One such was the International
Order of the Good Templars, organized around temperance but func­tioning
as a fraternal lodge. Finally, as we have seen, there were also
self-consciously Swedish political organizations.
This culture was derived from the Swedish culture of the period
of the great migration, but developed along lines that reflected the
American experience of these immigrants. Most of the fraternal and
social service organizations have their roots in the nineteenth cen­tury.
By the 1920s, a new cluster of organizations arose in Chicago,
this time with the specific purpose of preserving provincial, rather
than national, customs, language, and habits. These were the H e m b y g ds
föreningar, including groups such as the Jämtlands g i l l e t,
Smålandsförbundet, Bohusföreningen, etc. By 1933 there were twenty-three
separate clubs for immigrants from particular provinces or cities
in Sweden. In addition, there was a dance group, Folkdanslaget
National, which performed "authentic" dances of "peasant life" in
"authentic" folk costumes at the H e m b y g d celebrations, Midsummer,
and lodge programs and theatrical performances to "wake memories
to life."2 4 Nineteen of the twenty-three clubs were founded between
1924 and 1932, at the end of the era of mass migration. While nearly
all the clubs found themselves forced to do some sort of relief work
for their members after the 1929 stock market crash, all were founded
not as relief societies, but with the goal of promoting the traditions of
a particular province, city, or origin.
130
By 1950, the earliest expressions of Swedish fraternal life—the
Vasa Order, the Vikings, the Svithiod, and even the Good Templars—
were in a period of decline. The same can be said of the social clubs.
The last of these, Dalaklubben, ceased operations and sold its Long
Lake property in 1999. Nevertheless, these provincial social clubs
changed the understanding of Swedish culture. They were less inter­ested
in adapting Swedish traditions to American custom than the
predecessor organizations, and more interested in preserving what
were perceived to be the folk traditions of the home province.
For Budd, as for many Swedish Americans of the second and
third generation, it is this folk tradition that is most "Swedish." Thus
her characters learn proper Swedish table manners—or at least some
of them. They celebrate Lucia Day (13 December), have a proper j u l
smörgåsbord, and celebrate j u l g r a n s p l u n d r i n g on Tjugonde Knut (13
January). Missing from Budd's Swedish celebrations are p u b l i c holi­days
when one expressed Swedishness.25 The public holidays Budd's
Swedish Americans celebrate are American: the Fourth of July,
Thanksgiving, Christmas Day. The Swedish holidays are celebrated
as "borrowings" from the land of the forebears. They are all private,
family-oriented celebrations. They are, by and large, the same cel­ebrations
Swedish Americans today observe in much the same way
as they did in the 1950s, as borrowings from a folk culture that
became frozen in time.
This folk culture was not only frozen in time, it was also codified.
In 1955 the American Daughters of Sweden published one of the
most successful books Swedish America has ever seen: S w e d i s h Reci­pes
O l d and N e w . Unlike Budd's works, this one is still in print. The
significance of the book is that it teaches Swedish Americans how to
cook like Swedes. "For those who keep wishing for a certain dish that
a mother or grandmother used to make, there may be in this collec­tion
a recipe for that long remembered dish."2 6 Furthermore, not
only food preparation was codified; so were the celebrations and
traditions when, in 1964, Lily Lorenzen published her O f S w e d i sh
W a y s , detailing the traditions of Christmas, Midsummer, and the like.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Swedish America had
ceased to be a political force, ceased to argue for bilingualism and
the inclusion of Swedish language in the community's life, ceased to
131
have much of a public face at all. Swedish-American identity be­came
a private affair, an affair of the home, an affair often controlled
and directed by the women of the family. Thus Budd's three novels,
intensely centered on three generations of a single family and ending
with the birth of a new Sigrid to live in Norden, Illinois, U S A , are
the perfect expression for Swedish-American ethnicity as it is under­stood
today.
ENDNOTES
1. Western Electric "chartered" the lake steamer Eastland for an employee
outing on 24 July 1915. With 2,572 people on board, all Western Electric
employees, the ship cast off from the dock and immediately began to list, slowly
rolling over on her side in the Chicago River. While the majority of those on
board were able to escape, 844 of the passengers perished. The heroine of April
Harvest, Sigrid Christianson, is one of those on board and barely escapes death.
The event is related in such detail that it is clear Budd had first-hand informa­tion
about the tragedy.
2. Lillian Budd, April Harvest (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1959),
286.
3. John Miller, Vart Togo De Vägen? (Chicago: Svenska Journalistförbundet
i Amerika, 1945), 222.
4. Alex Carlson, I öst och vesterled (Chicago: self-published, 1946), 199.
5. Ernest W. Olson, ed., History of the Swedes of Illinois (Chicago: Engberg-
Holmberg Pub., 1908), vol. 2, 36.
6. Lillian Budd, L a n d of Strangers (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953),
227.
7. Budd, Land of Strangers, 228.
8. Adolph Benson and Naboth Hedin, Americans from Sweden, The People
of America Series (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1950), 275.
9. Budd, April Harvest, 6.
10. Budd, Land of Strangers, 304.
11. Consider, for example, the line drawn between Viking times and mod­ern
times in guidance given to the member of the Jämtlands gille on the occasion
of their adoption of a constitution (10 May 1924): "The Swedish people's ever­lasting
glory will always be the historical reality that the farmers, the foundation
of society, steadily maintained their independence from the other social classes.
A free people and a free agricultural class over a thousand year history is cer­tainly
a beautiful result of the Swede's love of freedom under law." E. Einar
Anderson, ed. Hembygden: Historisk Festskrift för Chicagos Svenska Hembygds-
132
föreningar (Chicago: Hembygdens Förlag, 1933), 39-40.
12. See David M . Young, Chicago Transit: A n Illustrated History (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1998).
13. Budd, L a n d of Strangers, 195.
14. In April Harvest the Bedell family becomes more self-consciously Swed­ish;
the only Swedish neighbors are the Yngling family.
15. Budd, April Harvest, 301.
16. This is not a point in the narrative where use of American Swedish
would be appropriate.
17. Budd, L a n d of Strangers, 152.
18. Ibid., 188.
19. Ibid., 249.
20. Ibid., 216.
21. Olson, History of the Swedes of Illinois, vol. 2, 81.
22. Ibid., 142.
23. Ibid., 139.
24. Anderson, Hembygden, 100.
25. These need not be annual events whose celebrations would be pre­cluded
by the American work calendar. Swedish Americans did find ways to
celebrate publicly during the period from 1891 to 1925. When Carl goes to the
World Columbian Exposition, for example, he chooses to attend the opening
ceremonies rather than Swedish Day. There is no mention of the kinds of events
that marked one as being "a Swede." No Midsummer, nor any of the American
pietist variations thereon. No julottan, despite the fact that Sigrid, in April Har­vest,
is involved in a Swedish Lutheran church, or at least a Lutheran church
with a Swedish pastor.
26. American Daughters of Sweden, foreword, Swedish Recipes O l d and N e w
(Chicago: American Daughters of Sweden, 1955).

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The American Moberg:
Lillian Budd's Swedish American Trilogy
Ithough she is nearly forgotten in the Swedish-American com­munity
today, Lillian Budd was once one of the most popular
authors Swedish America ever produced. Beginning with A p r i l
Snow (1951) and continuing through two additional novels, L a n d of
S t r a n g e r s (1953) and A p r i l H a r v e s t (1959), Budd presented the story
of a single Swedish-American family emigrating to the Chicago area
at the turn of the twentieth century. Much as Vilhelm Moberg did in
The E m i g r a n t s , Budd attempted to give a sense of the broad sweep of
the emigrant experience, following the family of Karl Mattias Petersson
from Sweden to the New World and into an American-born genera­tion.
Indeed, one of Budd's press releases called her "USA's Vilhelm
Moberg." She and Moberg do share a number of qualities. They both
wrote multi-volume works about the great migration from Sweden to
America. They both conducted tireless research. They both focused
on the fate of a single family on the American soil. Both series began
to appear at mid-century. But Moberg's work remains vital literature,
ranked as Sweden's own choice for the most important fictional work
of the twentieth century, while Budd's work feels far more dated, and
her prose lacks the vital quality that characterizes The E m i g r a n t s .
Nevertheless, Budd's three volumes preserve a valuable piece of the
CARL ISAACSON currently teaches communications arts at Sterling College in K a n ­sas,
about fifty miles from Lindsborg. He was educator/curator at the Swedish A m e r i ­can
M u s e u m in C h i c a g o . His research focuses mainly on the theatrical and material
aspects of Swedish-American culture in Chicago, and his essay "They Didn't Forget
Their Swedish: Class Markers in the Swedish-American Community" will appear in
Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City's Neighborhoods,
Maria F a n , ed. (Mahwah, N J . : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, lnc., forthcoming 2003).
C A R L I S A A C S ON
112
history of Swedish America. Written in the post-World War II, post-
Tercentenary, and post-Centennial era, they show us the face of
Swedish America, not as it was in 1891-1925 (the era in which
volumes 2 and 3 are set), but as it was becoming at mid-century.
In this article I will examine how Budd's work fits into and marks
changes in Swedish-American identity at mid-century. Because of
her obscurity in Swedish-American historical writing, I need to begin
by giving a brief biographical sketch and summarizing the three nov­els,
before turning to the question of what these books tell us about
Swedish-American ethnic identity in the post-World War II era and
beyond.
Lillian Budd was born in Chicago on 21 July 1897, and was a
child of Swedish immigrant parents Charles A . and Selma Nelson
Peterson. According to the book jacket of L a n d of S t r a n g e r s , she grew
up in Chicago and Oak Park, both of which figure in L a n d of Strang¬
ers and A p r i l H a r v e s t . She had one sister, Sigrid, a resident of Lombard,
Illinois, for most of her adult life. In 1918 Lillian married Fred Budd
of Budd Lake, New Jersey, and they had one son, Richard Nelson
Budd.
Lillian Budd began working for Western Electric in 1915. Whether
she joined the company before or after the 24 July Eastland disaster is
not clear, but that event clearly stuck in her mind and formed the
basis for one of the most memorable episodes in A p r i l H a r v e s t . 1
She ended her career with Western Electric in 1917, volunteer­ing
for military service at the beginning of the American entry into
the war. She served as a Naval Yeoman in the Office of Naval
Operations, Washington, D.C. This service put her in regular contact
with the President, Woodrow Wilson, and his young Under-Secretary
of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Following the war she re­turned
to the western suburbs of Chicago and became involved in
American Legion Post 52, where she was the only female member
and membership chair.
In 1940 she moved to Geneva, Illinois, where she was active in
civic affairs and began to compile the historical information she used
as background to L a n d of S t r a n g e r s . During the Second World War
she served as chief clerk for the Kane County Selective Service
Board in Geneva, remaining in that post until 1947—when she be-
113
gan yet another career, as promotions manager and assistant to the
vice president of the Campana Sales Company of Batavia, Illinois.
She remained with them until 1951. It was while employed by
Campana that she wrote her first novel, A p r i l S n o w . She moved to
Lombard in 1947, residing there until 1970. In that year Lillian and
her sister, Sigrid, broke up the home they shared and moved to the
West and East Coasts, respectively. Sigrid settled in Princeton, New
Jersey, to be with her son, Marshall Sittig; Lillian moved back to
California, where she remained until passing away in April 1989.
During her lifetime Lillian Budd
received the kinds of honors she
wished for Karl Petersson (called Carl
Christianson after his immigration),
the central character of L a n d o f
S t r a n g e r s . In 1954 her sorority,
Sigma Kappa, began awarding the
Lillian P. Budd "trophy" to the chap­ter
that did the most significant work
in aging and gerontology. In 1964
she was elected the first national
honorary member of Phi Gamma Nu
national business fraternity. The
Briggs Floral Company of Califor­nia
named a large white gladiolus
April Snow in her honor. Her work
as a pioneer woman in the military
continues to be remembered by
military historians, and the Lombard,
Illinois, pubic library has a signifi­cant
memorial to her, adding to its
collection each year in her name.
Budd began writing professionally rather late in life. She was fifty-two
when she finished A p r i l S n o w , her first book. That work proved
to be both a commercial and a critical success, selling over 250,000
copies by 1955, bringing her instant recognition in the Chicago
literary community, and prompting her work on the second volume
of the trilogy, L a n d of S t r a n g e r s . After publication of April H a r v e st
Lillian Budd. F r o m Something About
the Author, vol. 7 (Detroit: Gale Re-search
Book Tower, 1 9 7 5 ).
114
(1959), she turned from the writing of adult fiction to children's
literature, and produced works on Indian legends, on Swedish holi­day
customs, and an A B C book. The trilogy continued to be popu­lar,
however, and was reissued in paperback in 1979. In total, she
wrote three adult novels, one juvenile and seven children's books,
and one local history. Her last work, Footsteps on t h e T a l l Grass P r a i r i e:
A H i s t o r y of L o m b a r d , 1 L , was completed in 1975, when Budd was a
vigorous seventy-eight.
Her goal as a novelist was modest. Her success as a writer, she
hoped, would encourage other women to write, even while "hold[ing]
down a full time job successfully, com[ing] home and cook[ing] din­ners."
As might be expected of the era, the three novels are marked
by this same domestic concern. A l l the heroines are heroic at home,
managing to keep a "good house" despite overwhelming odds.
The trilogy tells the story of one Swedish emigrant family. Its
central figures are Carl and Ellen Christianson, as they are known in
America—Karl Petersson and Elin Nilsson, as they are known in
Sweden—and their forebears and progeny. The first and most suc­cessful
volume, A p r i l S n o w , is set in Sweden and treats life on the old
family farm. Central to Karl's life and story are his parents. His father,
Peter Christiansson, is a miserly, pietistic Swede who refuses to work
the farm since it is his wife's inheritance. His mother, Sigrid, is the
true heroine of Budd's heart. She is hard working, clever, pious with­out
being pietistic, and a lover of literature. It is she who has inher­ited
the family farm, Norden. Karl is the first male in a family of
many children, and clearly his mother's favorite. Early in this first
volume he is given a horse, Hjärta, on which he sets his future hopes
and through whom Budd motivates much of the action in the first
two volumes of the trilogy. The book is set on one of the islands in
the Göteborg skerries. Though we are given the name of the farm,
the island itself is never named. From clues in L a n d of S t r a n g e r s we
can guess that it is located north of Göteborg.
The second work, L a n d of S t r a n g e r s , follows Karl as he leaves
home, completes his military service, begins work as a farm hand in
Småland, and finally emigrates to America. In the second half of this
volume Karl Mattias Petersson, renamed Carl Matthew Christianson
by immigration officials at Castle Gardens in New York, settles in
115
Chicagoland, marries Elin Nilsson, begins to raise a family (a girl,
Sigrid, and a boy, Tony), and finally perishes doing a heroic deed.
The third volume, A p r i l H a r v e s t , tells of orphaned daughter Sigrid
beginning life as a young adult, enduring the trials of the early twen­tieth
century and finally marrying the "boy next door," a young
Dutch-American doctor, Nico van Vlaardingen.
Thematically, the three works celebrate the cultural triumph of
the European American. In Budd's view, America truly is a melting
pot of all European nationals. She begins developing this theme early
in Carl's American experience. In the middle of L a n d of S t r a n g e r s,
Carl, hoping to become enrolled in a stenography course at Wheaton
College, travels from New York to Geneva, Illinois, to seek his for­tune.
There he becomes part of a largely Swedish community, though
he does develop a positive relationship with the American-born Mr.
Bailey, editor of the temperance paper The P a t r o l He also finds and
"adopts" an Italian street urchin, Tony, whose father is an alcoholic.
(Another major theme is the evil of drink.) Budd further develops
the theme of America the melting pot with the birth of Carl and
Ellen's son. Carl insists that the boy be named Tony. She pushes the
theme further when Carl saves the life of a little German-American
boy, Bobby Schmotzer. The theme reaches a peak in A p r i l H a r v e s t,
when Sigrid gathers around her Dutch, Finnish, German, Irish, and
American friends for a Fourth of July celebration. Of course, Sigrid
has all these friends because of her open heartedness, solid work
ethic, and winning personality, which Budd portrays as ideal Swed­ish-
American character traits. Finally, Budd articulates the theme
most fully at the end of A p r i l H a r v e s t . As Sigrid returns home from
her first trip to Sweden, seeing the Statue of Liberty and the ap­proaching
coastline, she thinks:
The very air repeated her father's words: "Every country can
say, 'Next to my own country, in American there are more of
our nationals than anywhere else.'" America—upon whom
the whole world was depending for guidance. America—the
only country related to all countries by blood, thereby neces­sarily
being the one to take the leadership in joining all
countries of the world in friendly bond.
116
" A n d America is my home!"2
Budd's fictional characters function in a historically accurate mi­lieu,
particularly when she describes nineteenth-century Geneva, Illi­nois,
but they remain fictional characters so she can develop the
themes that she finds appropriate to this trilogy of Swedish-American
life. The theme of the melting pot raises the question of the meaning
of ethnic identity if this "country [is] related to all countries by
blood" and must therefore take "leadership in joining all countries of
the world in friendly bond." Must each ethnic group give up its
identity, or is it possible to affirm the older versions of ethnic iden­tity?
Or must ethnicity be thought of in some new way? Budd's work
answers that it is possible to maintain aspects of the old ethnicity, but
there are also new aspects of ethnic identity for the Swedish Ameri­can.
These new aspects define a new identity, one fit for the third and
fourth generations of the children of European immigrants. It is to
those affirmations and changes we now turn.
In the three novels, Budd affirms, and even attempts to extend,
the mythos by which the Swedish-American intellectual elite had
shaped ethnic consciousness from the 1880s through the 1930s. With
the end of the great migration, the end of the Depression, and the
coming (and ending) of the Second World War, ethnic consciousness
among the Swedish Americans shifted perceptibly. Several keen ob­servers
saw the change coming even prior to mid-century.
In his 1945 narrative of the hardships faced by some of the
immigrants, Va r t togo de vägen?, John Miller remarked that "the end
of Swedishness in America is going quickly now." He then contin­ued:
A l l Swedish-American organizations are going backwards.
The total number of members is declining, it is only the
elderly people who take part in the work of the associations.
It isn't as lively at the conferences as before, when youth was
on the move. The denominations have long ago abandoned
the Swedish language. For various reasons it has been pre­served
in some of the associations, but even here it will
slowly disappear entirely. That does not mean that Swedish
117
America will lose its importance as a bridge between America
and Sweden, quite otherwise, the descendants of the Swedes
who are totally incorporated into the American society have
greater potential to serve here as an intermediary than the
first generation, who were required to work hard just to put
food on the table in this foreign land.3
Alex Carlson, in the essay "It Was a June Day in Lincoln Park,"
shares a similar evaluation of the future of Swedish America. A t a
Linné Day celebration the narrator meets one of the Swedish-Ameri­can
urban pioneers, who remarks that "the old folks die out, bit by
bit, and the young choose new paths. For those of us who came over
the sea, Carl von Linné on Linné Day represents the whole of Swe­den
and the memories all of us carry of it, wherever our crib stood in
Sweden's Kingdom." After the old man leaves, the narrator continues
to ponder the future of Swedish America, fearing that it will not
outlive this generation. Then he hears a Vasa children's choir, singing
in "ringing clear Swedish" learned from parents and the group leader,
and understands that the culture will continue, though the language
in which it is related may shift.
Yes, the young are those who will continue the tradition here
in Lincoln Park once a year, and if they can't sing in Swedish,
the same songs can be sung in English, which is of course the
country's language and works just as well, for the words could
be translated and the music is always the same. Yes, the
young are those, regardless of which organization they belong
to, who will uphold the tradition as long as they are not
ashamed of their Swedish roots, and therefore there is no
reason not to hope for the present or the future and the
language forms the same thoughts, even if the expressions
are different.4
With both Miller and Carlson one finds an acknowledgment of
the gradual change in Swedish America now reaching a definite
turning point, and also a sense of nostalgia for the history of the
community in Chicago. Writing in approximately the same historical
118
period, Budd describes the content of Swedish-American ethnic con­sciousness
after the changes have occurred. In this Budd is the more
perceptive observer. Her distance and isolation from the main cur­rents
of Chicago's Swedish-America society should be seen as factors
enabling her to note, describe, and chronicle what is "new" in Swed­ish
America at mid-twentieth century. In her historical novels Budd
describes Swedish-Americanism not so much as it was in 1890 as in
1950. The identity formed for these characters contains both "essen­tial"
characteristics, held in common and throughout the existence
of the Swedish-American community, and "accidental" characteris­tics
that have radically changed by mid-century.
Budd believed that three qualities were essential to define Swed­ish-
Americanism: a filiopietistic love of one's ancestor race; the clus­ter
"cleanliness, order, beauty, and justice"; and the Viking heritage.
These will be given closer attention below, and I then will examine
three qualities earlier Swedish Americans took to be essential but
which became, by mid-century, accidental: living as a Swedish com­munity,
speaking the Swedish language, and developing a public and
political expression of Swedishness.
ESSENTIALS: FILIOPIETY, CLEANLINESS, AND VIKING HERITAGE
Swedish-American history writing, like much of American his­tory
writing throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth
century, displayed a strong tendency toward filiopietism. Whether
the subject was Sweden, America (Parson Weems' stories of George
Washington are repeated in the 1890 reader published by Augustana
Synod for use in Swedish schools), or Swedish America, historical
and biographical writing concentrated on telling a positive story.
The negative details were usually omitted. The forebears were all
presented as heroic and without serious flaw.
Consider, for example, the biography of Othelia Myhrman in
H i s t o r y of the Swedes of I l l i n o i s . 5 While these biographies often owe a
great deal to the subject, rather than being objective biography,
nevertheless they do illuminate a basic self-understanding of Swedish
Americans in the early twentieth century. In Myhrman's case, the
biography omits a number of interesting and relevant facts. Her
119
husband's drinking problems and her subsequent divorce are not
mentioned, even though they are pertinent to her involvement in
relief work and make her a more compelling figure.
Likewise, the biography of Anders (Andrew) Löfström, a promi­nent
publisher of the D a l k u l l a n A l m a n a k s , lists only his convention­ally
acceptable roles and omits his involvement with the Bohemian
element of Chicago's Swedish-American society. During the early
years of the century, Löfström's joke books, in addition to pirating
humorous material from Sweden, also published original humor from
the likes of Ninian Waerner and Gus Higgins. These two, along with
actor/director Ernest Lindblom, were the center of a lively, hard-drinking
Bohemian subculture in Chicago. Higgin's drawings of Chi­cago
Avenue Swedish life give us a sense that the filiopietistic reports
are not telling the whole story, and that in fact the missing pieces are
at least as interesting as what is reported in the standard histories of
the period.
Budd's work does not break from the filiopietistic tradition of
Swedish-American history writing. Although she gives her central
character a major flaw—Carl develops a serious drinking problem,
which remains unsolved throughout his life in the New World—she
never allows this to become the kind of problem we see portrayed
among the Irish and Italian drinkers. Instead, reports of Carl's drink­ing
problems are always undercut by events in which heroism over­comes
the deficit created by his drinking. Typical of the episodes is
one in chapter 20. Ellen has just announced that she is expecting.
Carl, not sure what to do, spends a restless night and leaves for work
the next morning having argued with his wife. He does not return
the whole night. Ellen suspects the worst. When Carl is brought back
to the house, wet and bedraggled, Ellen thinks
So this was what manner of man she had for a husband. A n d
she in the family way. While she sat home and waited and
worried, while she bad good-morning to the sun by retching,
he had sat in some saloon!6
Budd then immediately undercuts Ellen's anger with Carl's boss's
report of Carl's heroism. Carl was not in a saloon, but spent the night
120
fighting a fire at the milk-bottling plant. A t the climax of the fire,
just as the beams holding up the roof fell, Carl rushed back into the
burning building to save a child, and then one last time to save a
"tiny kitten, a calico kitten colored orange, white and black."7 She
does likewise in A p r i l H a r v e s t , where another Swede is given a charac­ter
flaw and a drinking problem. In that episode Sigrid saves young
Jack Yngling from alcohol and criminality, and convinces her em­ployer
to take Jack on as his mechanic.
Budd reaffirms the historical view of an earlier generation. Part of
that piety ascribed certain characteristics to the forebears. One of the
clearest, briefest statements of these characteristics—contemporane­ous
with Budd's writing—is found in Benson and Hedin's A m e r i c a ns
f r o m Sweden. Discussing the Swedish Americans who practiced law
and served in government, Benson and Hedin note: "Instinctively
they love order and justice just as they do cleanliness and beauty."8
These characteristics are central in the mythos of Swedish America.
Being hard-working, clean, and honest distinguishes the Swede from
other nationalities. Budd follows the model, making all of the dishon­est
characters in L a n d of S t r a n g e r s American-born. Whatever Carl's
flaws, he is never less than honest. Likewise Ellen and Sigrid. Honesty
and the nobility that accompanies truthfulness are inherent in their
characters.
So too are cleanliness and hard work. With a baby on the way,
Carl and Ellen rent an apartment, which badly needs cleaning. Ellen
turns a basement hovel into a proper Swedish home. Later, despite
coming from an upper-class family, Ellen takes the occupation of a
laundress, one that requires both cleanliness and hard work. A t the
beginning of A p r i l H a r v e s t , Sigrid demonstrates that she too is indus­trious
and clean. Immediately following her father's funeral, Sigrid
expects mourners to come by the Calico Row house and feels that
she must be a proper hostess.
With the coming of the light she went to the kitchen and put
on a gingham apron. The neighbors would be dropping in;
she must have lots of coffee ready, egg coffee, and the mak­ings
of tea for the few who preferred it, and milk for the
children. How many apple cakes would she need? Better
121
make plenty.9
The sense of justice and order is apparent in the evening Carl
spends listening to Martina Arneson practice her speech on women's
suffrage and prohibition, during his Geneva sojourn. Later, when
Hattie Allspaugh espouses the same views, Carl wonders, "What was
it about this woman that urged him to reject his life-long champion­ship
of woman's cause?"10
That championship was learned from his Morfar in Sweden, and
Carl carries it, at least in principle, throughout the first two novels.
This same theme of the love of justice lies behind the inclusion of
excluded individuals, such as the shunned children Sigrid is called
upon to take into her circle of friends.
As important as it is for Budd to show us that there is a sense of
justice among these Swedes, it is just as important to show that their
sense of justice has been passed down from one generation to an­other.
The ultimate source of all that Carl and Ellen are is their
Viking heritage. By making the Viking stock so central to her main
characters (she claims that the island on which Norden is situated
was Grendel's lair and connects Göteborg with the Geats), Budd
reaffirms another essential feature of the Swedish-American identity:
that Swedes learned their justice from their Viking ancestors. The
Viking spirit gives Swedes a passion for democracy as well as a sense
of adventure, hardiness as workers, strength, and endurance of char­acter—
as well as their capacity for alcohol consumption.
That the Viking spirit was celebrated among Swedish Americans
is easy to see. Countless Swedish clubs took names of the Viking
gods: Freya, Thor, Odin, Balder, Brage. One of the most successful of
Chicago's singing clubs, the Svithiod, was "Viking themed." The art
of the period is likewise filled with stereotypical images of Vikings,
such as Axel Linus's 1930s painting The M e a d F l o w s , executed for the
Svithiod club; or his painting of the conference of Erik the Red, and
others. That all this adds up to a claim for democracy originating in
Viking times is a bit more difficult to establish. It was, however, a
common argument that the Viking council, the Thing, was and re­mains
the basis for Western democracy.11
While Budd affirms many more of the earlier aspects of Swedish-
122
American identity, thus agreeing that they are essential to Swedishness
even in America, what is of greater interest are the three characteris­tics
that she makes "accidental," that is, caused by circumstances and
therefore open to change. These are enclave living, the use of Swed­ish,
and a public and in some sense political—and therefore manly
(in the nineteenth-century sense of that term)—culture. Each of
these facets of Swedish Americanism had radically changed by the
post-World War II era. Each is also an aspect of Swedish-American­ism
today that is seen as permanent but is, in fact, a relatively recent
historic development.
ACCIDENTALS: RESIDENTIAL PATTERNS, SWEDISH LANGUAGE,
PUBLIC CULTURE
From 1850 until 1900, Swedish settlement in Chicago was largely
confined to the area known as Swede Town, bounded by the Chi­cago
River on the south and west, Division Street on the north, and
Clark Street on the east. After the great Chicago fire of 1871, some
of the Swedes used the loss as an occasion to move to the new
suburban communities of Lake View (Belmont and Clark), Edgewater
(Clark and Foster), and Englewood (63rd and Halsted). Part of the
reason for the move was upward mobility. Another part of the story
was the development of a new, convenient public transportation
system that linked the city center with its outlying suburbs. The
pattern of dispersal was repeated for other ethnic groups as well. The
Bohemians moved southwest from the center of the city to Pilsen
and Little Village, the Norwegians northwest to Logan Square.
Between 1880 and 1905, the basic outlines of what we know
today as the CTA, with its elevated and surface lines (in 1905 the
street railway), had been established, connecting all points of the
rapidly expanding city. It was no longer necessary for workers, or
their bosses, to live within walking distance of their place of employ­ment.
For five cents, the fare set by law, every worker could now live
where he and his family chose. The upwardly mobile Swedes of
Swede Town chose to move out of the old and deteriorating neigh­borhood.
1 2
The second settlements of Swedes in the Chicago area were, not
123
surprisingly, at the ends of rapid transit lines. The dispersal was away
from the original settlement, but was not a general dispersal of the
Swedes into the larger American community. In the closing decades
of the great migration (1900 to 1930), Swedish immigrants contin­ued
to arrive needing the support offered by a solid ethnic commu­nity
of their countrymen. The new century's Swedes were still bat­tling
the English language and still, according to Methodist pastor
and social worker John P. Miller, apt to fall into the hands of the
unscrupulous, the "runners," who were bent on separating the "green­horn"
from his cash and might lead him into drink or worse. The
social organizations that supported the newcomers-—the church, the
fraternal and the social service organizations, as well as the stores and
amusements designed to remind the Swedish newcomer of the home­land—
were clustered in the ethnic enclave.
Budd's Swedish Americans do not need the support of a Swedish
network. When Carl arrives in Chicago following his time in Geneva
and his involvement in a disastrous get-rich-quick scheme, he settles
into work and lives in a boarding house on Clark Street. The land­lady
gets high praise from Carl, but we fail to learn her name. That
Budd intended the reader to assume Carl lived in the Swedish dis­trict
seems likely, since he "doubles up" during hard times with the
alcoholic but good-hearted Swede Andy Nelson. Nelson, brother of
Carl's Swedish love, Elin Nilsson, dies. Elin (at this point in the
narrative known as Ellen Anderson) comes from New York for the
funeral, and Carl rents a room nearby "at Mrs. Binney's boarding-house
on Clark Street . . . not a fine room, but passable and as clean
as any Irishwoman kept a room."13
After Carl and Ellen marry, they room with Mrs. Lonergin until
Ellen's first pregnancy. Ellen then finds a cheap flat ("not far from
Rose H i l l Cemetery"), let to them by a Mr. Ferguson. When Ellen's
tuberculosis threatens and the doctor advises a move away from the
lake, she and Carl rent a flat "near the city limits" from Hattie
Allspaugh. Their downstairs neighbor is a Mrs. Kant. Finally, the
family moves into the fictional suburb of Oakhurst, into "Calico
Row," where they are surrounded by all nationalities. The only Swede
in the picture is Pastor Bedell, and the only hint in the second
volume that he is a Swede is his wife's name, Kristen.
124
While in Chicago, Carl and Ellen participate in both American
activities (going to an American theater and the White Sox game)
and Swedish activities (a dance at the North Side Turner Hall). Carl
gets himself arrested at a socialist rally where Swede Axel Lindquist is
the featured speaker. He works for contractor Einar Swanson, an­other
Swede. But all the connections to a Swedish community occur
prior to the move to Oakhurst. After that, and through the third
volume of the novel, there is no Swedish community to which to
turn for support. There are only individual Swedes and Swedish
families.1 4 Yet the trilogy ends with Sigrid more "Swedish" than either
of her parents. After marriage, she and her new husband set about
building "Norden, Illinois, America"—"a replica of her father's home"
that would make it "possible for her native-born American friends to
know how her forefathers had lived in another land."1 5 Clearly, Budd
is telling us is that it is not necessary to live among Swedes, either
exclusively or even primarily, in order to feel the sense of being a
Swede. It is the heart which determines one's Swedishness, not the
neighborhood. The accidental characteristic of enclave living has no
effect on the quality of one's soul.
This shift from living in enclaves to living dispersed among the
general population correlates with three events: the cessation of the
immigrant stream around 1930, the policy of the GI Bill regarding
loans for housing construction, and the opening of the interstate
highway system. The first meant that there was no further need for an
ethnically homogeneous neighborhood to support and Americanize
newly arrived, non-English speaking immigrants. The effect of the
cessation was not, however, immediately felt in residential patterns.
The effect of the GI Bill was immediate. Returning veterans
could not use GI Bill funds to buy existing homes in the old neigh­borhoods,
nor was there land to develop in the old neighborhoods.
The suburb as we know it today was given birth after 1945. Like so
many others, Swedish Americans became suburbanites.
The effects of the cessation of the immigrant stream and the
building of suburban housing were well underway when Budd wrote
A p r i l S n o w . The event that spelled the end of the ethnic enclave, she
did not experience but did anticipate. The Edens Expressway, the
first in Chicago, opened the northern suburbs for settlement in 1959.
125
The Kennedy opened in 1964, and the northwest corridor was ready
to be settled. Like the extension of the transit system, the opening of
the new expressways encouraged resettlement from the old neighbor­hoods.
But without the need to keep to an ethnic enclave, and with
the increasing ease with which Swedes found themselves accepted in
the general population, the settlers no longer needed to settle to­gether.
Enclave living truly was a chapter in the history of mass
migration and not an essential of Swedishness in post-1945 America.
The second accidental quality of Swedishness in Swedish America
was the use of the Swedish language. The language question was a
long and hotly debated one, with most of the elite of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries coming to the conclusion that loss of the
Swedish language meant loss of the ancient and noble culture of
Geijer, Tegnér, Afzelius, Strindberg, Heidenstam, Bellman, Lagerlöf,
and Fröding. This was culture to the literary elite, that is, the journal­ists
and the clergy.
Culture, argued the elite, was preserved by the language. Swed­ish
was not, or at least not seriously, taken to be God's purest tongue,
as was English by some anglophiles and German by the Lutheran
Church Missouri Synod. But it was held up for the immigrants as a
pure and holy tongue which deserved respect and proper usage.
Proper usage is what Budd fails to give Swedish, particularly in
L a n d of S t r a n g e r s . Her errors in Swedish are frequent and egregious.
Her use of the language in this volume marks her as one who is
learning Swedish while she is writing about Swedish Americans. She
writes, for example, that Ellen would tell Carl that she has "arbeta
i d a g " an imperative rather than a simple past. While still in Sweden,
Karl ponders those who wait for their inheritance before taking an
entrepreneurial risk. They are sure that someday soon a " s t u r e arv
comer i n " using a very old-fashioned form of stör, the English come
instead of the Swedish a t t k o m m a , and the English in instead of the
Swedish i , and putting it all in a direct translation of an American
phrase that would never be used in Swedish.1 6 The examples could
easily be multiplied.
Budd was not alone in having a less than perfect command of the
language of her forebears. For example, the chapter in Geneva's
centennial history covering the Swedes there quotes the song "Skada
126
a t t A m e r i k a " a popular immigrant ballad. It misspells two words. Or
again, the Swedish American Museum, Chicago, has a poster on
display announcing the great national day to honor Gustavus
Adolphus. It misspells the great king's name.
Facility in Swedish slipped in America via two routes. It declined
as fewer Swedes arrived, lessening the number of Swedish speakers
who could renew the language in America. As the first generation's
children matured, they were less able and had fewer occasions to use
the language. English was their mother tongue and Swedish their
second language. Swedish facility also declined through the use of
American Swedish, a peculiar blend of Swedish and English that was
used both as an everyday language among Swedish Americans and,
in literature, as a comic dialect akin to the use of the dialects of
Småland, Värmland, and Skåne in Sweden.
In Budd's fictional world, all that is needed to express Swedishness
are a few phrases. In A p r i l H a r v e s t , for example, Sigrid teaches an
Irish orphan boy not to leave the dinner table before saying the
obligatory "tack för m a t e n . " Carl plays the Swedish version of "Intsie
Weentsie Spider" with his son Tony. A l l the children learn "Rida, Rida
Ranka." These few phrases are all that is needed, because the center
of Swedish culture in the new Swedish America is not the high
culture, either literary or visual. It is folk culture.
Visit a Swedish-American home today and one is likely to find
one or all of the following items: a white coffee pot decorated with
kurbits flowers and the phrase "Kaffetåren den bästa är af a l l a jordiska
d r i c k e r " ; a Carl Larsson print; and one or more Dala horses. In the
post-World War II period, culture shifted its meaning in Swedish
America, and that shift cut it loose from the use of Swedish, though
the continuing popularity of adult education courses attests to a
desire to communicate "a lite g r a n n , " at least, in the ancestral lan­guage.
Like the ancestral language, Budd observes a fading of the ances­tral
politics, or at least a less public face to the political expressions.
From the C i v i l War to the Great Depression, Swedish Americans
(with the exception of the Texas Swedes, cf. Larry Scott's S w e d i sh
T e x a n s ) were dependably Republican in their politics. The characters
in the America volumes are all, with the exception of the American
127
Hattie Allspaugh, reliably Republican. But their Republicanism is
expressed in voting and in opinions spoken in the security of the
household.
The first political philosophy we meet on the American soil
comes in Budd's Geneva chapters. The philosopher is the expressman's
wife, Martina. Prevented by a heavy rain storm from attending a
temperance talk, Martina practices a speech she is scheduled to give
in the presence of Jane Addams, a speech on women's suffrage. Carl
listens approvingly, for he has learned to value women's suffrage at
home at Norden.1 7 This is the closest that Budd gets to allowing her
Swedish characters a public display of their political principles.
More frequently, Carl's, and later Sigrid's, Republicanism is a
private matter. Attending the opening of the World Columbian Ex­position,
Carl hears the lament, "The Democrats are in; now we will
have hard times," and he smiles to hear the word go round, for he
knows no hard times himself.1 8 Carl expresses the sentiment that the
country will face dire consequences if it is foolish enough to elect Mr.
Bryan and allow him to institute his silver standard.19 He opposes the
imposition of an income tax.2 0 These are all standard Republican
positions of the era, but they are always expressed as private opin­ions,
never given an organized and public expression.
Similarly, Sigrid's Republicanism is expressed strictly in an indi­vidualistic
and family manner. A p r i l H a r v e s t spans two contested presi­dential
elections, and in each Sigrid exhibits Republican sympathies.
She is not enfranchised for the 1916 Wilson/Hughes contest. She
casts her first vote for the Republican Warren G . Harding and his
running mate, Calvin Coolidge. The whole neighborhood goes for
Harding, except for Hattie Allspaugh. Allspaugh is a native-born
American, and she issues her opinion as an American, not as a
member of an ethnic group. While the Swedes in A p r i l H a r v e s t all
vote for the same ticket, they are not conscious of being a Swedish
voting block.
This is in contrast to the political awareness of the Swedes in
Cook County. In the biographies found in H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , one frequently encounters notice of political affiliation among
the Cook County Swedes. Individuals are described as "a rock ribbed
Republican," "a true and loyal Republican," "a staunch Republican,"
128
and the like. Surveying the biographies, one finds that many of the
Swedes profiled were active in organized politics. Alexander Ander­son,
for example, held "several offices in the Swedish Democratic
National Assembly,"2 1 while Oscar Dell Olsson was the secretary of
the "Swedish-American [sic] Republican League of Illinois for 1902-
03."2 2 Further, Axel Jonas Walter af Jochnick "worked zealously to
form a regiment of Swedish-Americans [sic] in Chicago" at the out­break
of the Spanish-American war.2 3 What should be noted is that
many of these self-designated strong Republicans identified them­selves
as Swedish Republicans (or Democrats, or Socialists, as the
case may be).
In the early years of the twentieth century, ethnicity was a public
matter with political and social consequences. While many Swedes
declared themselves "independent," and more were simply unwilling
to discuss their politics in print, the community leaders in Chicago's
most Swedish wards knew that organization meant political clout,
jobs, and services for their ward and precinct. Likewise, American
political leaders counted on ethnic leaders to deliver the votes in
their respective wards.
Budd's two novels lack the sense of a public ethnicity in their
political expositions. That dissolution of the public face of ethnic
politics accompanies the dissolution of the solid Swedish ward. With
the Swedish populace scattered into the community, there was no
question of delivering blocks of votes, of winning an election ethnic
precinct by ethnic precinct. In post-1945 politics, the vote that
"counts" is the vote of an individual, and not the vote of an ethnic
block.
As the political culture shifted, and Swedish ethnicity took on a
less important political meaning, the question of usefulness and with
it the meaning of ethnicity shifted. I believe this involved a shift from
the older Swedish-American culture defined as a culture of "manly
affairs" to a more domesticated culture that was imitative of the
perceived folk traditional culture of Sweden. Swedish-American cul­ture,
in other words, ceased to be a living, developing culture and
attempted to become a frozen, "authentic" folk culture. In so doing,
many Swedish Americans became "more Swedish than Sweden."
The Swedish-American culture of the nineteenth and early twen-
129
tieth centuries was rich, varied, and developing. It had its own litera­ture,
though much of it was either religious or journalistic. It had its
own oratory, both political and religious. Much of its social life was
centered around associational life, which in itself was richly varied.
Labor saw the rise of groups such as Swedish painters' and carpenters'
unions. The crafts and professions likewise had substantial-sized "guilds,"
such as the Swedish Engineers Society, the Swedish Watchmakers
Society, and the Swedish Artists Association. In addition, there was a
wide variety of fraternal organizations, theatrical associations, and
singing societies. Some existed purely for entertainment, while others
sought to provide the working-class Swede with moral uplift and life
insurance. Still other associations existed primarily for social welfare,
while others had mixed purposes. One such was the International
Order of the Good Templars, organized around temperance but func­tioning
as a fraternal lodge. Finally, as we have seen, there were also
self-consciously Swedish political organizations.
This culture was derived from the Swedish culture of the period
of the great migration, but developed along lines that reflected the
American experience of these immigrants. Most of the fraternal and
social service organizations have their roots in the nineteenth cen­tury.
By the 1920s, a new cluster of organizations arose in Chicago,
this time with the specific purpose of preserving provincial, rather
than national, customs, language, and habits. These were the H e m b y g ds
föreningar, including groups such as the Jämtlands g i l l e t,
Smålandsförbundet, Bohusföreningen, etc. By 1933 there were twenty-three
separate clubs for immigrants from particular provinces or cities
in Sweden. In addition, there was a dance group, Folkdanslaget
National, which performed "authentic" dances of "peasant life" in
"authentic" folk costumes at the H e m b y g d celebrations, Midsummer,
and lodge programs and theatrical performances to "wake memories
to life."2 4 Nineteen of the twenty-three clubs were founded between
1924 and 1932, at the end of the era of mass migration. While nearly
all the clubs found themselves forced to do some sort of relief work
for their members after the 1929 stock market crash, all were founded
not as relief societies, but with the goal of promoting the traditions of
a particular province, city, or origin.
130
By 1950, the earliest expressions of Swedish fraternal life—the
Vasa Order, the Vikings, the Svithiod, and even the Good Templars—
were in a period of decline. The same can be said of the social clubs.
The last of these, Dalaklubben, ceased operations and sold its Long
Lake property in 1999. Nevertheless, these provincial social clubs
changed the understanding of Swedish culture. They were less inter­ested
in adapting Swedish traditions to American custom than the
predecessor organizations, and more interested in preserving what
were perceived to be the folk traditions of the home province.
For Budd, as for many Swedish Americans of the second and
third generation, it is this folk tradition that is most "Swedish." Thus
her characters learn proper Swedish table manners—or at least some
of them. They celebrate Lucia Day (13 December), have a proper j u l
smörgåsbord, and celebrate j u l g r a n s p l u n d r i n g on Tjugonde Knut (13
January). Missing from Budd's Swedish celebrations are p u b l i c holi­days
when one expressed Swedishness.25 The public holidays Budd's
Swedish Americans celebrate are American: the Fourth of July,
Thanksgiving, Christmas Day. The Swedish holidays are celebrated
as "borrowings" from the land of the forebears. They are all private,
family-oriented celebrations. They are, by and large, the same cel­ebrations
Swedish Americans today observe in much the same way
as they did in the 1950s, as borrowings from a folk culture that
became frozen in time.
This folk culture was not only frozen in time, it was also codified.
In 1955 the American Daughters of Sweden published one of the
most successful books Swedish America has ever seen: S w e d i s h Reci­pes
O l d and N e w . Unlike Budd's works, this one is still in print. The
significance of the book is that it teaches Swedish Americans how to
cook like Swedes. "For those who keep wishing for a certain dish that
a mother or grandmother used to make, there may be in this collec­tion
a recipe for that long remembered dish."2 6 Furthermore, not
only food preparation was codified; so were the celebrations and
traditions when, in 1964, Lily Lorenzen published her O f S w e d i sh
W a y s , detailing the traditions of Christmas, Midsummer, and the like.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Swedish America had
ceased to be a political force, ceased to argue for bilingualism and
the inclusion of Swedish language in the community's life, ceased to
131
have much of a public face at all. Swedish-American identity be­came
a private affair, an affair of the home, an affair often controlled
and directed by the women of the family. Thus Budd's three novels,
intensely centered on three generations of a single family and ending
with the birth of a new Sigrid to live in Norden, Illinois, U S A , are
the perfect expression for Swedish-American ethnicity as it is under­stood
today.
ENDNOTES
1. Western Electric "chartered" the lake steamer Eastland for an employee
outing on 24 July 1915. With 2,572 people on board, all Western Electric
employees, the ship cast off from the dock and immediately began to list, slowly
rolling over on her side in the Chicago River. While the majority of those on
board were able to escape, 844 of the passengers perished. The heroine of April
Harvest, Sigrid Christianson, is one of those on board and barely escapes death.
The event is related in such detail that it is clear Budd had first-hand informa­tion
about the tragedy.
2. Lillian Budd, April Harvest (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1959),
286.
3. John Miller, Vart Togo De Vägen? (Chicago: Svenska Journalistförbundet
i Amerika, 1945), 222.
4. Alex Carlson, I öst och vesterled (Chicago: self-published, 1946), 199.
5. Ernest W. Olson, ed., History of the Swedes of Illinois (Chicago: Engberg-
Holmberg Pub., 1908), vol. 2, 36.
6. Lillian Budd, L a n d of Strangers (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953),
227.
7. Budd, Land of Strangers, 228.
8. Adolph Benson and Naboth Hedin, Americans from Sweden, The People
of America Series (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1950), 275.
9. Budd, April Harvest, 6.
10. Budd, Land of Strangers, 304.
11. Consider, for example, the line drawn between Viking times and mod­ern
times in guidance given to the member of the Jämtlands gille on the occasion
of their adoption of a constitution (10 May 1924): "The Swedish people's ever­lasting
glory will always be the historical reality that the farmers, the foundation
of society, steadily maintained their independence from the other social classes.
A free people and a free agricultural class over a thousand year history is cer­tainly
a beautiful result of the Swede's love of freedom under law." E. Einar
Anderson, ed. Hembygden: Historisk Festskrift för Chicagos Svenska Hembygds-
132
föreningar (Chicago: Hembygdens Förlag, 1933), 39-40.
12. See David M . Young, Chicago Transit: A n Illustrated History (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1998).
13. Budd, L a n d of Strangers, 195.
14. In April Harvest the Bedell family becomes more self-consciously Swed­ish;
the only Swedish neighbors are the Yngling family.
15. Budd, April Harvest, 301.
16. This is not a point in the narrative where use of American Swedish
would be appropriate.
17. Budd, L a n d of Strangers, 152.
18. Ibid., 188.
19. Ibid., 249.
20. Ibid., 216.
21. Olson, History of the Swedes of Illinois, vol. 2, 81.
22. Ibid., 142.
23. Ibid., 139.
24. Anderson, Hembygden, 100.
25. These need not be annual events whose celebrations would be pre­cluded
by the American work calendar. Swedish Americans did find ways to
celebrate publicly during the period from 1891 to 1925. When Carl goes to the
World Columbian Exposition, for example, he chooses to attend the opening
ceremonies rather than Swedish Day. There is no mention of the kinds of events
that marked one as being "a Swede." No Midsummer, nor any of the American
pietist variations thereon. No julottan, despite the fact that Sigrid, in April Har­vest,
is involved in a Swedish Lutheran church, or at least a Lutheran church
with a Swedish pastor.
26. American Daughters of Sweden, foreword, Swedish Recipes O l d and N e w
(Chicago: American Daughters of Sweden, 1955).